Saturday, November 29, 2008
What "legal" means
There seems to be a lot of confusion here in Victoria, and at city council, about what the word "legal" means.
It is the duty of the police to enforce the law, and others to conform to it. BUT:
The law consists of the Constitution, Charter of Rights, previous legal decisions (precedent), common law, Tort (civil) law, and - according to the Nuremberg tribunal - supervening international legal and moral norms as well. TOGETHER these constitute the law. (Albeit the last is contradicted by the Notwithstanding Clause of the Canadian Constitution, which clause could be invoked for anything at all including the mass murder of people with red hair, elimination of free speech, or a new holocaust - all these would be superficially "legally" in Canada if the Notwithstanding Clause were invoked.)
A statute or bylaw may declare night day and day night, but that doesn't make it so. Policework is not merely a game of "Simon Says" where we substitute "City Council" for "Simon." That game isn't legal in Canada. The latest whim of council isn't law unless it conforms to the Charter of Rights, Constitution, etc. Not for the police, nor anyone else. Neither is it enough to say that whatever the courts have not specifically ruled out in previous decisions is therefore legal should a brand-new bylaw declare it so. There's no principle in law that everything is legal "until it is specifically ruled against by a judge." (This is the equivalent of "let's just do it until we get caught" or "it's legal until we get caught." But, no it ain't.)
In summary: "I was just obeying orders" doesn't remove culpability from authorities, post-WWII, or according to Canadian law.
Where the police have every reason to suspect that law and bylaw might conflict, the legal course is instead to set up a test case, with the cooperation of those affected where possible (a "collusive action"); and to otherwise suspend any enforcement until the courts have ruled on that test case.
The police, who are in an increasingly difficult position, have been very ill-used by Council and by their own management as tools to break the laws. This taints the reputation and effectiveness of the police generally, diverts them from the duties they were trained for, and make any future cooperation between the homeless community and law enforcement officials extremely difficult - yet that cooperation must eventually come about, for everyone's sake. Nevermind what you see on the TV show CSI, police have always relied on the community to do the bulk of the work in discovering, reporting and providing the evidence to enforce the law. This will have to be true for the homeless community as well in the future, but nothing could create a larger obstacle to this than years of directed, systematic law-breaking by the people entrusted and paid to maintain the law.
The question is, why have the police decided to be such thorough (and culpable) codependents? It may be that both they and the City Council believe that intimidation and some degree of cruelty and lawlessness by the police will discourage homelessness here, or at least, discourage the homeless from moving to Victoria. Where law isn't sufficient, skirting the law or simply breaking it, is the next resource. Anyone can understand the temptation to grasp at simple solutions for growing, and frightening, problems, if not the contempt for the law. Extra homeless people in Victoria are an inconvenience for everyone including the homeless people already here, but...
Given the compulsory nature of most homelessness and, for that matter, the uniquely kind weather of Victoria within Canada and B.C. (although most homeless are not newcomers), this experiment in twisting the arms of the victims again and again is absolutely futile. Sooner or later, council must come to understand this, however distressing it may to them to give up on the dream of violently pushing away homelessness must be to the more comfortable. If this was going to happen, it would have happened - the police were freer in previous years to act illegally (and did) than they can possibly be in the years to come now that the scrutiny of the courts has been aroused.
I would not wish to be a police officer in Victoria, or nearly anywhere else in North America, today. I am grateful that many are willing to serve as peace officers. But I earnestly appeal, with emotion that cannot enter into this text, that the police, and in particular their management, look to their own interests, and their own future interests with regard to the questions pertaining to homelessness. The council has thoroughly betrayed those interests, and the police cannot act too quickly to ensure that their officers now strictly obey the whole of the law, and begin to rebuild the reputation that they must have to do their job (and to do it more easily and in less peril) within and without the homeless community.
I might humbly submit that in order to commence this new approach, the police should immediately cease some techniques they now employ to evade accountability: Primarily, stop using volunteers merely dressed as police at the front desk who don't actually know the law. This current practice allows citizens to believe they have made a report to the police by talking to the front desk, or that they have advice from authority, when neither is true. Moreover no record of any kind is made of their report unless the volunteer on their own sole authority decides to tell them how to make an actual report, in writing, on the correct form. This is a great way to keep crime stats down, but thoroughly mischievous, as well, and calculated to bring the police into disrepute. Everyone showing up at the desk can be given a number and one sentence description of their report (anonymous or not) which is reported and retained by the police for future reference. Similarly re phone reports, everyone phoning in has to be given a report number and the call be databased, even if with a one-sentence description, and even if the report was anonymous. Now, my experience has been that phone operators seem to be trained to do everything they can, including balding lying about what the law is, in order to avoid any report being recorded if at all possible. I don't doubt that the police are underfunded, but this isn't the way to deal with that. It might even be that actually recording all crime reports would result in more funding.
by Russell Johnston
http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-legal-means.html
It is the duty of the police to enforce the law, and others to conform to it. BUT:
The law consists of the Constitution, Charter of Rights, previous legal decisions (precedent), common law, Tort (civil) law, and - according to the Nuremberg tribunal - supervening international legal and moral norms as well. TOGETHER these constitute the law. (Albeit the last is contradicted by the Notwithstanding Clause of the Canadian Constitution, which clause could be invoked for anything at all including the mass murder of people with red hair, elimination of free speech, or a new holocaust - all these would be superficially "legally" in Canada if the Notwithstanding Clause were invoked.)
A statute or bylaw may declare night day and day night, but that doesn't make it so. Policework is not merely a game of "Simon Says" where we substitute "City Council" for "Simon." That game isn't legal in Canada. The latest whim of council isn't law unless it conforms to the Charter of Rights, Constitution, etc. Not for the police, nor anyone else. Neither is it enough to say that whatever the courts have not specifically ruled out in previous decisions is therefore legal should a brand-new bylaw declare it so. There's no principle in law that everything is legal "until it is specifically ruled against by a judge." (This is the equivalent of "let's just do it until we get caught" or "it's legal until we get caught." But, no it ain't.)
In summary: "I was just obeying orders" doesn't remove culpability from authorities, post-WWII, or according to Canadian law.
Where the police have every reason to suspect that law and bylaw might conflict, the legal course is instead to set up a test case, with the cooperation of those affected where possible (a "collusive action"); and to otherwise suspend any enforcement until the courts have ruled on that test case.
The police, who are in an increasingly difficult position, have been very ill-used by Council and by their own management as tools to break the laws. This taints the reputation and effectiveness of the police generally, diverts them from the duties they were trained for, and make any future cooperation between the homeless community and law enforcement officials extremely difficult - yet that cooperation must eventually come about, for everyone's sake. Nevermind what you see on the TV show CSI, police have always relied on the community to do the bulk of the work in discovering, reporting and providing the evidence to enforce the law. This will have to be true for the homeless community as well in the future, but nothing could create a larger obstacle to this than years of directed, systematic law-breaking by the people entrusted and paid to maintain the law.
The question is, why have the police decided to be such thorough (and culpable) codependents? It may be that both they and the City Council believe that intimidation and some degree of cruelty and lawlessness by the police will discourage homelessness here, or at least, discourage the homeless from moving to Victoria. Where law isn't sufficient, skirting the law or simply breaking it, is the next resource. Anyone can understand the temptation to grasp at simple solutions for growing, and frightening, problems, if not the contempt for the law. Extra homeless people in Victoria are an inconvenience for everyone including the homeless people already here, but...
Given the compulsory nature of most homelessness and, for that matter, the uniquely kind weather of Victoria within Canada and B.C. (although most homeless are not newcomers), this experiment in twisting the arms of the victims again and again is absolutely futile. Sooner or later, council must come to understand this, however distressing it may to them to give up on the dream of violently pushing away homelessness must be to the more comfortable. If this was going to happen, it would have happened - the police were freer in previous years to act illegally (and did) than they can possibly be in the years to come now that the scrutiny of the courts has been aroused.
I would not wish to be a police officer in Victoria, or nearly anywhere else in North America, today. I am grateful that many are willing to serve as peace officers. But I earnestly appeal, with emotion that cannot enter into this text, that the police, and in particular their management, look to their own interests, and their own future interests with regard to the questions pertaining to homelessness. The council has thoroughly betrayed those interests, and the police cannot act too quickly to ensure that their officers now strictly obey the whole of the law, and begin to rebuild the reputation that they must have to do their job (and to do it more easily and in less peril) within and without the homeless community.
I might humbly submit that in order to commence this new approach, the police should immediately cease some techniques they now employ to evade accountability: Primarily, stop using volunteers merely dressed as police at the front desk who don't actually know the law. This current practice allows citizens to believe they have made a report to the police by talking to the front desk, or that they have advice from authority, when neither is true. Moreover no record of any kind is made of their report unless the volunteer on their own sole authority decides to tell them how to make an actual report, in writing, on the correct form. This is a great way to keep crime stats down, but thoroughly mischievous, as well, and calculated to bring the police into disrepute. Everyone showing up at the desk can be given a number and one sentence description of their report (anonymous or not) which is reported and retained by the police for future reference. Similarly re phone reports, everyone phoning in has to be given a report number and the call be databased, even if with a one-sentence description, and even if the report was anonymous. Now, my experience has been that phone operators seem to be trained to do everything they can, including balding lying about what the law is, in order to avoid any report being recorded if at all possible. I don't doubt that the police are underfunded, but this isn't the way to deal with that. It might even be that actually recording all crime reports would result in more funding.
by Russell Johnston
http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-legal-means.html
The Swan of Avon Explained?
Is what follows too obvious to say, or has it been too obviously overlooked?
I've been looking at Sir Francis Bacon's writings on the beginning of Science, and the Royal Society - spurred on by a CBC radio "Ideas" program that I had to look up quotes for online next day, since I was listening in healthy, true darkness.
Related Google enquiries led to links to the question of whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare. I love such thoroughly eccentric explorations of history, true or false, credible or laughable, for the same reason that anyone who's read a huge pile of history books (and doesn't have their head stuck up their ass) ought to love 'em - they take me far from the well-worn facts of history I've read about, often literally hundreds of times, into genuinely new territory (whether my guide is inept or not.) That's refreshing if you love history but sometimes find it hard to obtain genuinely new grist for the mill.
In the process of encountering many delicious tidbits of otherwise hopelessly obscure history that's refreshingly new to me, it could be I've stumbled on an overlooked clue to the mystery of authorship, just maybe, maybe (if there is any mystery, of course.)
Should you want to know why Ben Jonson called Shakespeare "Sweet Swan of Avon", as Bertram Theobald did:
"Now one word about the 'Sweet Swan of Avon.' Has it ever struck anyone that if this phrase is to be taken at its face value, it is singularly inept as a simile? The verses of a poet are melodious,or should be."
http://www.sirbacon.org/bertrambj1623folio.htm
It may be instructive to look at a line very early on in Robert Green's "Groats-Worth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance" (1592), incidentally our first published mention of Shakespeare, which line is retailed as if it were a common enough saying of the time:
The Swan sings melodiously before death, that in all his life vseth but a iarring sound.
http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/greene1.html
That is: "The Swan sings beautifully at death, who all his life used (issued) only a jarring sound."
In the context of that popular saying (as it seems from the context in Green's pamphet), Jonson's calling Shakespeare "a sweet swan of Avon" has new meaning. It's quite a funny line (and still packs a punch today) if the the rude Shakespeare from Avon were not much of a poet, but the Shakespeare about to become part of history with the posthumous publication of the Folio, was a very fine poet indeed.
But note that how melodious a swan is depends very much on the species of the swan.
Which leads us to another explanation: that Green's contemporary version of the saying isn't relevant, but the Phaedo is, where Plato has Socrates say that swans "having sung all their life long, do then sing more, and more sweetly than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are about to go away to Apollo, whose ministers they are." Or even Shakespeare himself, who in Othello has Emilia say "I will play the swan, and die in music."
If so, Jonson only meant to say that Folio was the Bard's beautiful final song, as it was.
Or, we could give the final word to Wikipedia, "Swan Song":
The phrase "swan song" is a reference to an ancient belief that the Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) is completely mute during its lifetime until the moment just before it dies, when it sings one beautiful song.
Cygnus olor was originally native to the British Isles, and that restores the Baconian jest to Jonson's words.
Jonson and Green were both playwrights and contemporaries in London and might be supposed to have used the allusion similarly, or likely so. On the other hand, Johnson was self-educated but would have known Plato. Still Green went to Cambridge and Oxford and could hardly have escaped knowledge of the Phaedo, himself. We report, you decide.
I've been looking at Sir Francis Bacon's writings on the beginning of Science, and the Royal Society - spurred on by a CBC radio "Ideas" program that I had to look up quotes for online next day, since I was listening in healthy, true darkness.
Related Google enquiries led to links to the question of whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare. I love such thoroughly eccentric explorations of history, true or false, credible or laughable, for the same reason that anyone who's read a huge pile of history books (and doesn't have their head stuck up their ass) ought to love 'em - they take me far from the well-worn facts of history I've read about, often literally hundreds of times, into genuinely new territory (whether my guide is inept or not.) That's refreshing if you love history but sometimes find it hard to obtain genuinely new grist for the mill.
In the process of encountering many delicious tidbits of otherwise hopelessly obscure history that's refreshingly new to me, it could be I've stumbled on an overlooked clue to the mystery of authorship, just maybe, maybe (if there is any mystery, of course.)
Should you want to know why Ben Jonson called Shakespeare "Sweet Swan of Avon", as Bertram Theobald did:
"Now one word about the 'Sweet Swan of Avon.' Has it ever struck anyone that if this phrase is to be taken at its face value, it is singularly inept as a simile? The verses of a poet are melodious,or should be."
http://www.sirbacon.org/bertrambj1623folio.htm
It may be instructive to look at a line very early on in Robert Green's "Groats-Worth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance" (1592), incidentally our first published mention of Shakespeare, which line is retailed as if it were a common enough saying of the time:
The Swan sings melodiously before death, that in all his life vseth but a iarring sound.
http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/greene1.html
That is: "The Swan sings beautifully at death, who all his life used (issued) only a jarring sound."
In the context of that popular saying (as it seems from the context in Green's pamphet), Jonson's calling Shakespeare "a sweet swan of Avon" has new meaning. It's quite a funny line (and still packs a punch today) if the the rude Shakespeare from Avon were not much of a poet, but the Shakespeare about to become part of history with the posthumous publication of the Folio, was a very fine poet indeed.
But note that how melodious a swan is depends very much on the species of the swan.
Which leads us to another explanation: that Green's contemporary version of the saying isn't relevant, but the Phaedo is, where Plato has Socrates say that swans "having sung all their life long, do then sing more, and more sweetly than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are about to go away to Apollo, whose ministers they are." Or even Shakespeare himself, who in Othello has Emilia say "I will play the swan, and die in music."
If so, Jonson only meant to say that Folio was the Bard's beautiful final song, as it was.
Or, we could give the final word to Wikipedia, "Swan Song":
The phrase "swan song" is a reference to an ancient belief that the Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) is completely mute during its lifetime until the moment just before it dies, when it sings one beautiful song.
Cygnus olor was originally native to the British Isles, and that restores the Baconian jest to Jonson's words.
Jonson and Green were both playwrights and contemporaries in London and might be supposed to have used the allusion similarly, or likely so. On the other hand, Johnson was self-educated but would have known Plato. Still Green went to Cambridge and Oxford and could hardly have escaped knowledge of the Phaedo, himself. We report, you decide.
Monday, November 24, 2008
How we got here - according to the Governor of the Bank of Canada
Wonder why we have a depression or recession thanks to the subprime lending crisis? Here's an insider's view:
Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney interviewed by Carrie Gracie
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/the_interview.shtml
Last Updated: Saturday, 22 November 2008, 23:32 GMT
Excerpts:
"A: The fear had become self-fulfilling."
....
"Q: What exactly, in your view, went wrong? These banks just borrowed too much, was it?
A: "They borrowed too much: they did two things, they borrowed too much, they had too much debt, relative to their amount of capital without question, but they felt they could do that because they felt they weren't taking any risk. And they short-circuited some of the very basic aspects of banking. Which is that, banking is about, in some respects it's about relationships, you should know your customer, you should know the business or person you're lending to, um, and you should, ah, do analysis in terms of their ability to repay. And what became, they did two elements of shorthand for that, instead of having that type of relationship credit-based, you know, hard-nosed the [garbled] advisor type of banking, what they did was, they relied on other people to make judgements, these were the famous credit agencies that were rating them at triple A or, they felt that they were taking on a loan, but it only mattered - they weren't going to hold onto the loan, it only mattered how quickly they could sell it to somebody else. In the terminology, they had 'warehouse risk'. So as long as they could get rid of the hot potato, quickly, it didn't matter. Well, you know, the music stopped eventually, they still had it, and because they had it in such size, it's been a very painful process to work that out.
....
Q: And why wasn't that spotted...
A: We had some faith in this as well...
[A: The mistake that was made was that when the subprime market was small, you had to be a good risk to get in but as they expanded the likelyhood of default increased] "But people were seduced, or only remembered the old assumption, they didn't realize that the expansion of this [subprime lending market from 2% of US lending to 15%] would change the equation."
Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney interviewed by Carrie Gracie
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/the_interview.shtml
Last Updated: Saturday, 22 November 2008, 23:32 GMT
Excerpts:
"A: The fear had become self-fulfilling."
....
"Q: What exactly, in your view, went wrong? These banks just borrowed too much, was it?
A: "They borrowed too much: they did two things, they borrowed too much, they had too much debt, relative to their amount of capital without question, but they felt they could do that because they felt they weren't taking any risk. And they short-circuited some of the very basic aspects of banking. Which is that, banking is about, in some respects it's about relationships, you should know your customer, you should know the business or person you're lending to, um, and you should, ah, do analysis in terms of their ability to repay. And what became, they did two elements of shorthand for that, instead of having that type of relationship credit-based, you know, hard-nosed the [garbled] advisor type of banking, what they did was, they relied on other people to make judgements, these were the famous credit agencies that were rating them at triple A or, they felt that they were taking on a loan, but it only mattered - they weren't going to hold onto the loan, it only mattered how quickly they could sell it to somebody else. In the terminology, they had 'warehouse risk'. So as long as they could get rid of the hot potato, quickly, it didn't matter. Well, you know, the music stopped eventually, they still had it, and because they had it in such size, it's been a very painful process to work that out.
....
Q: And why wasn't that spotted...
A: We had some faith in this as well...
[A: The mistake that was made was that when the subprime market was small, you had to be a good risk to get in but as they expanded the likelyhood of default increased] "But people were seduced, or only remembered the old assumption, they didn't realize that the expansion of this [subprime lending market from 2% of US lending to 15%] would change the equation."
